Wild Land Ahoy!

In the Oostvaardersplassen.

Oostvaardersplassen?  A pithy way of saying, more or less, "The place through which ships sail on the way from Amsterdam to the East Indies".

As ships once did.  When the land was a sea. 

But the Dutch never saw a sea that they didn't want to dehydrate. Especially when it washed the shores of Holland, the most heavily populated part of a very crowded country. So, in the 1930s,the Dutch began to dyke off and dry out four massive areas of land to the east of Amsterdam, at the southerly end of the Zuiderzee.  However, even the best laid plans of Dutch hydro-engineering can go astray.

And inadvertently become the subject of the most amazing film I've seen in years. 



Water-logged

By 1968 three great polders were created, with all of the reclaimed land earmarked for industry, agriculture, and sparkling new towns such as Almere (now pop. 200,000) and Lelystad (76,000).  That wave of development crashed in 1973 thanks to the oil crisis and economic recession.

One large area covering about 56 square km (22 sq mi.), the Oostvaardersplassen (where the arrow points on the map above) -- which had never been fully drained -- was left behind and became home to egrets instead of factories.

Sensing opportunity, a determined group of conservationists set out to "strategize, proselytize and wheedle" the Oostvaardersplassen into being as a nature reserve unlike any other: a tract of re-wild land in the heart of one of the world's most densely populated nations.

Today, the Oostvaardersplassen is the world’s most visible example of rewilding, the idea of reintroducing the megafauna that man wiped out as he spread across the globe.

The New Wilderness

The idea of reintroducing the large fauna that lived there thousands of years ago came from Frans Vera, a government biologist working for the state forestry service, an organization charged with managing the nation's nature reserves. Unfortunately, most of the needed species are now extinct, killed off by humans as they moved in and cultivated European lands.  So Vera stocked the new wilderness with their nearest modern equivalents: Heck cattle, a German attempt to recreate aurochs, the original wild cattle of Europe, and Konik ponies from Poland, said to be descended from tarpans, the last of Europe’s wild horses. He shipped in red deer, which were among Europe’s original inhabitants.

These large grazing animals are kept out in the open all year round without supplemental feeding, and are allowed to behave as wild animals (without, for example, castrating males, or vaccinating or tagging animals).  The ecosystem developing under their influence is thought to resemble those that would have existed on European river banks and deltas before human disturbance -- vast, grassy plains where wild horses, cattle and red deer move in massive herds.

The Real Twitter

Vast numbers of birds flew in, including 29 endangered species:

Marsh harriers flapped and cruised overhead.  Red-headed smews paddled, dipped. A flotilla of coots chelped companionably as they cruised down-dyke. White butterflies settled on scat. The landscape felt riotous with life.

...Overhead, a goshawk—the first wild one I had ever seen—lifted from the grass and glided away, scattering smaller birds as it flew. A sea eagle took flight from a willow, leaving the tree-top shivering, dipping off on its vast wings, its primary feathers stretched out like a swimmer's fingers. 

Sea eagles came here of their own accord five years ago, moving down into the area from Scandinavia. They were charismatic proof of the conservation ethic of the Oostvaardersplassen: increase scale, reduce management inputs, resist species farming, avoid deliverables and goals, and let wild nature take its course as far as possible.*

 The world before humans

EMS FILMS had exclusive access to the Oostvaardersplassen in all seasons, and they worked there for three years. Their new feature film, De Nieuwe Wildernis (The New Wilderness) has just been released. It is magic.  I was lucky enough to attend the première -- with the Metropole Orchestra playing the powerful theme music, live** -- in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on Monday evening!

Open the trailer now. 



Great Nature in a Small Country

For once, there's not too much hyperbole about it: this spectacular film enters into the soul of an extraordinary experiment:

We simply need…wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures—a part of the geography of hope.  (Wallace Stegner, Wilderness Letter,1960)

The beauty of nature in the Oostvaartsplassen is overwhelming yet the film makes no bones about the struggle of animals left to their own devices.  Nature's 'circle of life' (for better and for worse) is red in tooth and claw, and dazzling, in De Nieuwe Wildernis.  

Yesterday, the film opened in 90 theatres in The Netherlands and Belgium.  Text is minimal and dialogue non-existent so you don't have to wait for translation into your native language before begging or buying (or, if need be, stealing) a DVD of this unforgettable film.




* Robert Macfarlane, 'And there's another continent', writing in The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, November/December 2012.  He erred, however, in ascribing the death of the trees to 'dehydration' (in The Netherlands, of all places!?!); rather it was a consequence of overgrazing.

** Now released as a single by Don Diablo:





Sources: In addition to the website of De Nieuwe Wildernis, I have used 'Amsterdam's Wild Side' in The Economist, 14 Sept. 2013; Robert Macfarlane, 'And there's another continent', Intelligent Life magazine, November/December 2012; Emma Marris, Conservation Biology: 'Reflecting the Past, Nature 462, 30-32 (2009); Elizabeth Kolbert, 'Recall of the Wild', The New Yorker, 24 December 2012; and Wikipedia's on the Oostvaardersplassen .

Illustrations

Modified Google map via Wolfstad.com (Our Visit to Oosvaarderplassen).

Common Kingfisher (in Dutch, IJsvogel), one of a pair, possibly the first specimens to be spotted in The Netherlands in our lifetime. Photo credit: Wolfstad.com (Our First Dutch Kingfishers): Every few minutes they dove in the water and picked up a small fish. If the fish was still moving the bird would hit it really hard against the branch until it stopped and then swallow it. This was a lot of fun to see, and the tiny birds ate an exceptionally large amount of fish.

Other illustrations from the website of De Nieuwe Wildernis

The Zenobia Scandal

Will not -- shall not -- every American look with pride -- an honest, noble pride -- on this marble effigy of Zenobia, because it is the ideal, the production, of an American, and that American a woman.*

Zenobia-in-Chains, an over-life size (7 foot, 208 cm) marble statue made by the American artist living and working in Rome, Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), was one of the most famous — and controversial — objects produced during the golden age of American classical sculpture in the mid-19th century.**  It was long assumed to be lost or destroyed, but after 123 years, it is again on public display at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. 

In contrast to typical classical sculptures of captive women -- naked, in shackles, and with downcast eyes (as, for example, Hiram Powers' titillating Greek Slave) -- Zenobia is dignified, fully dressed and holding the chains in her hands, as if she has ownership over her captivity.

It was a bold statement for any woman artist of the time to make. While many Neoclassical artists depicted mythological figures, Hosmer was chiefly drawn to female characters whose stories could be viewed as allegories for her strongly held feminist beliefs.  As she said,

Every woman should have the opportunity of cultivating her talents to the fullest extent, for they were not given her for nothing.

She began working on the monumental statue in 1858, taking new studio space to match the statue's size.  That December, she wrote to an American friend:

I wish you could raise your eyes from this paper to see what at this particular moment of writing I can see.  It would be a huge, magnificent room ... with a monstrous lump of clay, which will be ... Zenobia.

Harriet Hosmer ca. 1855

Soon afterwards, the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of, among other books,  The Scarlet Letter) was in Rome and visited Hosmer in her new studio:

Zenobia stood in the centre of the room, as yet unfinished in the clay, but a very noble and remarkable statue indeed, full of dignity and beauty.... I have seldom or never been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture.

The visit a year later of Sir Henry Layard -- English explorer, archaeologist, and trustee of the British Musum (an institution today loaded with treasures from Layard's excavations at Nimrud) -- was to bear spectacular fruit in the promotion of her career:  "I want to hear about your Zenobia", Layard wrote to her afterwards.  "Is she yet turned into a pillar of marble, for the admiration of posterity, or does she still stand in her frail mortal clay?"  He continues:

You have probably heard that there is to be a great universal exhibition in England in 1862....  I hope you will be induced to send something, that the women and men of England may know what a young lady of genius, with the estimable qualities of perseverance and determination, can effect. 

Success!

And so the statue travelled to the world fair in London to be set alongside the work of John Gibson -- the Welsh sculptor in whose Roman studio she had trained and where she had until recently worked -- in a place of high honour, thanks to Layard's influence.  With characteristic pride and modesty, Hosmer wrote to an American friend and patron (March 1862):

You don't know what a grand place they have assigned the Zenobia in the English exhibition.  A small octagonal temple is to be erected, with niches on four sides, to be lined with Pompeian red.  Into three of these go Mr Gibson's  colored statues, and into the fourth my own unworthy one.  This structure is to be just in the centre of the Exhibition.

That location also put Harriet Hosmer herself at centre stage in the most important international exhibition of the decade.  Her work was well received.  In three weeks, over 15,000 people paid to view the statues in their little temple.  Critics described Zenobia as "a figure of command", "a noble figure of Queenlike dignity" (no little praise when Victoria was on the British throne), and more poetically as "a high, heroic ode". 

Hosmer was on the verge of claiming a very high rank among the sculptors of the day.  

Harriet Hosmer 1857

But what if she hadn't actually made this giant statue? 

What if Zenobia was, in fact, carved by another hand?

On September 1, 1863, The Art Journal published an anonymous letter which complained about the meretricious charms of Zenobia -- said to be by Miss Hosmer but really executed by an Italian workman at Rome. Soon after, the prestigious British fashion and style magazine The Queen repeated this claim in a widely-read article.  

Scandal!

Are these her assistants or take-over artists?

Hosmer with her Italian workmen (1861), posing before her 'Fountain of the Sirens'.

When she produced the towering Zenobia, the work was quickly met with disbelief that a woman created it.   Some critics questioned whether a work of such sublime expression, on such a scale, and requiring such power of hand and arm in the carving could have been done by a woman.  In a way, The Art Journal and The Queen were pushing at an open door.

We won!  The enemy queen is our war trophy.

Harriet Hosmer saw it quite differently:

When [my brother artists in Rome] declared that I did not do my own work, I felt that I must have made some progress in my art; otherwise they would not have been so ready to attribute that work to one of their own sex.

Zenobia-Unchained

That Roman rumpus is the subject of a new book, The Zenobia Scandal: A Meditation on Male Jealousy by New York artist Patricia Cronin.**  Cronin explores Hosmer's life in Rome leading up to the events as they played out after the Great Exhibition.  In the Zenobia Scandal,  Cronin lets everyone speak in their own voices: "Since all the characters involved, whether it was Henry James or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, were major figures in the arts, I realized [that] I didn’t need to write this narrative.  I just let them speak in their own words, friends and foes alike.  So I sequenced their quotes to chronicle this event and Hosmer’s clever response that also really resonated with me."

So, early on, we hear Hosmer's lament: 

I had not been long in Rome before I was informed that an artist, with whom I was upon the most friendly terms, had engaged in spreading a report that the work which I claimed as my own was in reality the production of a paid workman.

As Cronin reflects, "While I was trying to figure out how and why Harriet Hosmer got erased from history, I learned ... exactly how people try to wipe you out: destroy your reputation, damage you financially so you just disappear."

Harriet Hosmer, however, was not about to disappear.

I hope and trust I may soon be involved in a law suit,  For seven years it has been whispered about that I do not do my own work but employ a man to do it for me.  This scandal has now reached the point when I am accused of being a hypocrite and a humbug.... 

The appearance of this damaging slander in print finally gave her the ammunition to initiate a libel action against the man responsible for starting the hare running and The Queen which had run with it.

The matter was put into the hands of a London lawyer, with Hosmer claiming damages of 1000 pounds -- a small fortune at the time.  The editor of The Queen quickly folded: if she withdrew her suit, he would print a fulsome apology and pay all costs.  She accepted his offer on the further condition that the grovelling apology also be inserted in The Times of London and the Galignani Messenger, (an English-language newspaper published in Paris, which circulated among the English-speaking community on the Continent -- rather like today's International Herald Tribune).

So Hosmer won, hands down. 

Zenobia was Hosmer's personal statement.  She chose Zenobia as a subject when all the men were choosing sexy suicidal Cleopatra – that’s how they saw women.  But Hosmer, as Patricia Cronin sees it, chose to depict a strong woman ruler at a moment of potential humiliation who, through her own agency persists, perseveres and prospers. This subject choice, as she says, is intentional.

The last word, of course, belongs to Harriet Hosmer:

I honor every woman who has strength enough to step off of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another; strength enough to stand up to be laughed at, if necessary. That is a bitter pill we must all swallow in the beginning....[I]n a few more years it will not be thought strange that women should be preachers and sculptors, and every one who comes after us will have to bear fewer and fewer blows."

"I would love that," says Patricia Cronin. "Nothing would make me happier."

I entirely share her sentiment.





* Anonymous author, The Saturday Evening Gazette, March 26, 1865, Harriet Hosmer Papers, Watertown Public Library, Watertown, MA.

** On Harriet Hosmer and Zenobia-in-Chains, see my blog posts Zenobia Lost and Found (10/07/09), The Huntington Makes Space -- for Zenobia (06/06/09).

*** Published by the book division of Zingmagazine, the SoHo-based art magazine  for contemporary/alternative  art projects.  Cronin will be having a solo museum exhibition in Rome (Italy) at  the Musei Capitolini, Centrale Montemartini Museo, opening October 2013.

The primary source is, of course, Patricia Cronin's The Zenobia Scandal, with most of the quotations in italics coming from that book. In addition to the blog posts listed in note **, sources include Alison Yarrington, "'Made in Italy': Sculpture and the staging of National Identities of the International Exhibition of 1862." In (M. Pfister - R. Hertel, eds.) Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. Amsterdam-New York (2008) 75-99.

Illustrations

Top: Zenobia-in-Chains, marble, 6 ft 10 in (208 cm).  Photo credit: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with the Virginia Steele Scott Acquisition fund for American Art.  Object Number: 2007.26.

Upper left: Photograph (salted paper print; photographer unknown) of Harriet Hosmer (ca. 1855).  Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Object number: NPG.84.150.

Next left: Portrait (oil on canvas) of Harriet Hosmer dressed in riding clothes (1857) by Sir William Boxall. Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Object number: NPG.95.6

Centre: Hosmer with her Italian workmen (1861).  Photo credit: The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Below left: Cover of The Zenobia Scandal: A Meditation on Male Jealousy by Patricia Cronin (2013). Publisher zingmagazine.

Below centre: Close-up of legend on the pedestal of Zenobia:  Harriet Hosmer carved me in Rome 

Below left: Hosmer on ladder in her Rome studio with commissioned statue of Thomas Hart Benton (ca. 1860-1862); statue erected in St. Louis in 1868.  Photographer:  Mariannecci.  Photo credit: The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University